Current trend in the semiconductor manufacturing is to integrate different components onto an ever more compact space. Such integration allows higher functional density while complicating manufacturing process due to circuit architecture. In some integrated circuit designs, polysilicon gate electrode is replaced with a metal gate electrode to improve device performance and achieve feature sizes.
Super-flash technology has enabled designers to create cost effective and high performance programmable system on chip (SOC) solutions through the use of split-gate flash memory cells. The aggressive scaling of the third generation embedded super-flash memory (ESF3) drives the flash memory capacity to a greater extent.